The Fare Forward Interview with Jack Shoemaker
Jack Shoemaker is the Founding Editor and Senior Vice President of Counterpoint Press in Berkeley, California. After dropping out of college in his first semester, he educated himself through reading and corresponding with authors he admired, including Gary Snyder, Robert Duncan, and Guy Davenport. In 1967, he opened the Unicorn Bookshop in Isla Vista, California, and began publishing pamphlets and broadsides from authors who read at the bookstore under Unicorn Press. In 1970, he moved to Berkeley and opened Sand Dollar, Booksellers and Publishers. Since then, Shoemaker has opened and operated several publishing companies and continued to correspond with, maintain relationships with, and publish writers such as Snyder, Wendell Berry, Robert Bringhurst, Robert Hass, and many more.
Interview Conducted by Sarah Clark
Fare Forward: When you were a young man and you decided to start corresponding with writers that you admired, what made you decide to do that?
Jack Shoemaker: My life was really changed, I think, by writing, when I was still in high school and I encountered the Transcendalists and Emerson and Thoreau and especially Ezra Pound, and so by the time I got ready to go to college, I was primed to think of myself as a literature major—even though I entered college as a homiletics and pastoral theology major. And when I went to school, I was in the middle of a kind of profound crisis of faith that being at a Christian college, at Westmont College, did nothing to alleviate. So I ended up leaving college after two months and never returned. And that was coupled with leaving the church, leaving the Southern Baptist church, which was a dramatic, traumatic thing for me to do at that stage.
But I had a teacher at Westmont—I was there for two months—named Jan Kingma, who taught Chaucer. I had an office meeting with him as I was getting ready to leave college, and he said, “You know, the great teachers are on the street.” And I thought, “Well, that’s an interesting thing for a college professor to say.” But I was determined to continue my education, and it had occurred to me by that stage that all college was, was a reading list, you know? It was just book after book, and one book led to another, and that was what one hoped for. So I set out with the help of Ezra Pound and a couple of other folks on a kind of lifetime reading list that I’m still involved with.
Obviously, the number of readers was very small as well, and I happened upon an anthology called The New American Poets edited by Donald Allen, and it was filled with poets that were extraordinarily important and interesting to me. And I also realized that they were people of the book; they were people that were really involved in serious intellectual work. And so I wrote to a couple of them, out of the blue. I just wrote to Robert Duncan and Gary Snyder, and I said, “I admire your work, and in this particular poem you mention this, and I wonder if you could tell me a source that I could find out more about this matter?” And they wrote back.
It’s astounding that they wrote back, because I was 18 or 19 years old, and I had no background; I had no reason to be taken seriously. I just asked I guess what turned out to be interesting questions. So they wrote back. And I began this correspondence, and then one writer led to another. There was a very important poet to me named Charles Olson, who wrote a book called A Bibliography on America for Ed Dorn, and it was a reading list, really, on how to become a native North American, and how to understand pre-European history in North America. So I started reading those books, just as I had started to read the books that Ezra Pound mentioned in Guide to Kulchur and ABC of Reading. And I wrote to Charles, and I asked him a couple of questions. And I guess he was, again, charmed by my naivete or whatever, but he wrote right back to me.
Pretty soon I was involved in quite a large correspondence, more than a dozen writers, but the principal ones really were Gary Snyder and Robert Duncan at the beginning. We’re talking about the end of the Sixties. So I didn’t know that you shouldn’t do that. I didn’t ever feel intimidated by exposing my ignorance to a stranger. Nor was I ever made to feel ignorant or strange, so that was a blessing. By the end of that couple of years after I had left school, I had a dozen correspondents, people that I was writing to that were interesting and interested in what I was trying to do and trying to read.
I went on to have a bookstore and when I got my first bookstore, I was trying to put a stock together, and it occurred to me the way to put a stock together would be to write to an expert in each field. Somebody that you could find. So if I was going to be buying books about psychology, I would write to a person that I thought knew a lot about psychology, and I would say, “If you had a hundred books to recommend for a bookstore, what would those hundred books be?” And again, people wrote back, and they gave me these booklists. And I started The Unicorn in Santa Barbara generally, primarily, by using those kinds of amateur experts to give us booklists, which we then put in stock. And again, one book led to another, one writer led to another, and some of those correspondents—that was 1966, 1967—some of those people I’m still corresponding with today.
The days of great letter-writing are largely over, because people have gone on to email and gone on to the telephone. So those contacts are not as rich as they once were, nor are those conversations as considered as they once were.
FF: Who are you still corresponding with?
JS: I talk or write to Gary Snyder two or three times a week. I’m also very much deeply involved with Wendell Berry. Now, things have changed and developed, so that the days of great letter-writing are largely over, because people have gone on to email and gone on to the telephone. So those contacts are not as rich as they once were, nor are those conversations as considered as they once were. You know, you don’t spend as much time composing an email as you do a letter. And you certainly don’t take as much care with a phone call as you would with a letter. So a lot of those correspondences that I had then dwindled out in the Seventies and Eighties—late Eighties—in favor of email, when it came in, and the telephone. As you know, Wendell doesn’t use a computer, doesn’t use email, so our correspondence is correspondence, but we also talk on the phone four or five times a month, so that’s substituted a lot for our letter-writing.
FF: You mentioned that those exchanges were subsequently less rich. Is that, do you think, because they are more immediate, and in what way do you feel like you’ve lost something by switching to those more immediate methods?
JS: Well, I think that emails are generally about something quite immediate and specific. And so it’s more of a method to get in touch, handle an issue, handle a problem, or handle a question, and then get off. And so it’s not that kind of leisurely investigation that you could have in a letter. Not that it couldn’t be. It just isn’t.
Gary Snyder has a couple of rules, and we’ve abided by these rules for as long as we’ve been doing email. He always wants me to tell him what my weather is like, and I always want him to tell me what his weather is like. And I always want to know who’s on premises—are his sons there, or is his dog around? I want to know what the physical setting of the email is, and he wants to know the same for me and so even if we’re trying to deal with a very specific matter, we try to contextualize it—does that make sense? Try to say, well we need to do this little piece of business, but, “By the way, how’s your dog doing?”
FF: Have you ever met any of your correspondents in person, and if so, how did they compare to the picture you had formed in your mind from corresponding with them?
JS: Meeting is an interesting word there, because I have met almost all of them. But meeting somebody after you’ve heard them read poetry in public—you already have a predisposition of what they’re going to be like as a person if you’ve been corresponding with them, and then you’ve gone to a public reading. I’m thinking of Robert Duncan. Robert Duncan had a very great presence in public. So did William Everson, Brother Antoninus. They had real presence and so after I’d been corresponding with each of them, I heard them read. So by the time I met them, that is, to sit down and talk to them over coffee or to do an interview or to hang out with them a little bit, I had a pretty good idea of what they were going to be like. So they were generally, pretty much, what I expected they would be.
FF: So you think corresponding is a good way to get to know someone?
JS: It’s a good way. Well, I think it probably depends on the person and the nature of the correspondence. When I was corresponding as a literary person trying to talk to somebody about matters of literature, I was not trying to get acquainted with them intimately or personally. That would usually develop over a longer period of time. And then if that led to a personal meeting, I did have a kind of intimate background to go on. But there were people that I corresponded with that I never met, and that I didn’t know anything really about except their work on the page and their work in a letter, to me. I never met Thomas Merton, but I knew his work well enough that I knew what he was likely to be like. But, you know, there are people that you don’t want to meet, too, that you’re satisfied with knowing them in that kind of abstract way.
FF: Of the people you wrote to, who were you most surprised that they responded to you?
JS: Well, the men—the poets, writers—that I was writing to (not all men, there were a couple of women) were people that had a certain measure of fame, I think, in the small scene that was poetry, and so on one level or another I was kind of surprised that any of them ever wrote back to me. As I say, I wasn’t anybody. I was corresponding with Robert Bly during the Vietnam War, and we started corresponding about the war. He had come to my bookstore to read, but he was a kind of larger-than-life character on the scene at that stage, and I when wrote to him about the war, I didn’t expect that he would answer. In fact, I don’t even think that I remember asking him a question. I just wrote to him.
We’ve taken ten days to get over a small amount of material. And in this hurry-up culture that seems like forever, but in fact I think we both are benefitting from a little bit of interim leisure time.
FF: If you think back—you’ve probably written and received hundreds of letters—are there any that stand out in particular to you as being your favorite, or the most remarkable, letters you’ve received?
JS: I had a correspondence with a person that wasn’t a published writer, named David Orr, who had lived in Kentucky, in Louisville. He was an ideal reader. And he wrote the most wonderful letters. So I’ve got one of them framed downstairs, just because I so loved him, and I loved his sensibility. And so I think one of his letters is probably my favorite. But he’s far from famous. Nobody in the world would know who he is. He just wrote wonderful letters.
I wrote letters back and forth with Michael Downing for a long time, the novelist who just died a couple of months ago and somebody who I was extremely close to. We carried on a correspondence for two years, a very self-conscious correspondence, I must say, where we were determined never to tell the truth to one another. So these are correspondences of our fantasy lives, and they build up characters almost like a novelist would. Each of us becomes a character. And I love my part in that correspondence because I don’t think I’ve ever been as creative or as free. But nobody in their right mind would be interested in it, and it’s just two men who decide they’re going to tell lies to each other and see what they can get away with.
FF: What do you do with the letters you receive? Do you save them all, or some of them?
JS: I’ve always been a bookseller, so in part of my bookselling life, I did keep everything together, and I did make archives. I have an archive of some of my business records and correspondence and manuscripts at Buffalo, and another at Stanford. The two are separated for no reason other than I changed my loyalty to Stanford, and the papers that will exist in the future will go to Stanford. But there are letters. As a young person I wasn’t as careful. I realized, when I started putting these archives together, that I’d lost track of a lot of stuff. And I still to this day find a letter that I wrote or received folded into a book in my library. And that’s careless. But I think there are some good examples in both those places.
FF: What would you think if someone ever decided to publish your correspondence?
JS: Oh, I don’t—I’ve published books of correspondence, of course. I’ve published Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder’s correspondence with one another; I’ve published Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder’s correspondence with another, and they seem to have real reason for being—biographical and critical and literary. But I don’t think my correspondences are of that kind, so I wouldn’t think that there would be value in collecting them together.
FF: One of your correspondents, Wendell Berry, famously wrote that he would never buy a computer. What do you think he got right, and what wrong, in that stance?
JS: Well, I just re-published Why I Won’t Buy a Computer, I just republished that little book in a pamphlet form. Wendell and I—we spoke this morning!—Wendell and I are working on a very big book, a very big book about racism and forgiveness and a lot of stuff. A five-hundred-page book. It’s going to be a book that a lot of people will look at as a kind of bookend to Unsettling of America, I think. And during the process, we’ve been doing this for about five years, we’ve been doing this really often, likely weekly, for two years—the editing.
I have grown so accustomed to electronic editing, and email, and the swiftness of response back and forth, and the ease of sharing manuscripts back and forth electronically. But this is the first time I think I’ve really realized what a burden not having a computer is to the process of back-and-forth editorial work. It’s also expensive. You know, if you’re taking a manuscript over to UPS and trying to overnight it back and forth from Berkeley to Kentucky, it involves some expense. On the other hand, it still provides what Wendell wants in this slow process of things: time to think. Time to reflect. So if I get something from him, it’s taken three days to get here. I will take three days to read it and respond. It will take three days to get back to him. We’ve taken ten days to get over a small amount of material. And in this hurry-up culture that seems like forever, but in fact I think we both are benefitting from a little bit of interim leisure time. A little bit of time back and forth.
You know, he writes on a long yellow tablet, by hand. And his wife Tanya types the first draft of the manuscript. And he is devoted to her and to her work and extremely responsive to it. After all these years, she becomes, really, in the process, his first editor. And then they make a typescript, and they used to make carbon copies. Now she goes into town and gets a xerox made and sends it to me. So that initial part of the process is all handwork. If he makes changes, I get substitute pages—in hard copy. I don’t get electronic things. I think we both have just so learned to deal at this pace, and when I’m dealing with my other writers, who are all electronic and they’re all hurry-up-and-wait kind of people, it can seem weird to me, compared to what Wendell and I do with each other, which is to take our time. And to be patient with one another. But it does elongate the process, there’s no question. We spend a long time in this work.
You know, with some of my other writers, I can do my edits on screen—as you have for your magazine—and I send it to them, and they can see it all immediately and they can take whatever time they need, and send it back to me, and I can see their responses immediately. Maybe there’s some pleasure in that, but I think at the end of the day I like the slower process. So I’ve never encouraged Wendell to get a computer. You know, he doesn’t even have an answering machine on his phone. So the way that you know that he’s not there is that he doesn’t answer.
I visited the farm for the first time in about 1971. He had just said, “If you’re ever in Kentucky, come see me.” And bizarrely enough, I was in Kentucky not long after, and I called him. He picked me up in Lexington and drove me out to the farm, and it really was one of those life-changing moments. When I left with a manuscript—the first thing that I published of his, I left with after that weekend—we’ve been working together ever since.
After you’ve been in this business for a while, you have a stable of writers, living writers, who are producing work on a regular basis, and you run out of openings on your list.
FF: How did you first come to meet him?
JS: I wrote him a letter.
FF: Of course.
JS: And then in part of the correspondence—I was a mail-order book dealer, and I sent him a couple of books and in part of the correspondence—he did say, as you can imagine he always is so gracious, he said, “If you’re ever in Kentucky.” Now, I had no plans to be in Kentucky when I got that letter, but I never forgot that invitation. And I was a member of the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Panel, and we had a meeting in Kentucky, bizarrely enough. And I wrote to him, and I said, “I’m going to be in Lexington x, y, and z.” And he said, “Come on out.” So he was still teaching then, commuting back and forth to Lexington from Port Royal. And he picked me up after the meeting, and he and Ed McClanahan drove me out to the farm, and I spent a couple—I think I spent two days—and then they drove me back to town. So unbelievably gracious. And I never looked back, I mean, I always tried to go to Kentucky twice a year after that, for many, many years.
FF: That’s wonderful. To jump back, can you tell me a little about how you transitioned from being a bookseller to being a publisher?
JS: Well, my first bookstore, Unicorn in Santa Barbara, we had a small press attached to it. And that was, again, a very self-conscious act. We knew that Shakespeare & Company in Paris had published Ulysses, and we knew that the Gotham Book Mart in New York had published literature, published books, so we started a press that was called Unicorn Press that was involved with the bookstore, and its goal was to print pamphlets and broadsides of writers who we invited to read. But we also published some other things. We published Thomas Merton’s essay “Ishi [Means Man].” Our first book was a book called Hark, Hark, The Nark, a pamphlet we gave away on the streets in Isla Vista and Santa Barbara for what to do if you were busted for holding marijuana, what your rights were, what your legal rights were. But generally we published literary books.
So when that bookstore closed and I moved up to Berkeley and started another bookstore, I started another press. And I had this position at the Literature Panel of the NEA, and we were always talking about the crisis in American publishing, that big publishers were requiring very high sales to make a book work—and that’s a complicated story, but anyway, I decided that I was going to start a small press, and a press independent of my bookstore, that was more like Farrar Straus or Faber & Faber than the typical small press. And by that time, I was representing as a literary agent Wendell Berry and Guy Davenport and a handful of other writers, and when I finally found somebody that was willing to help back a publishing company, I had this portfolio of writers who wanted to publish with me. So we started North Point in 1979. And those key writers, the core writers that enabled us to do that, have remained with me ever since.
FF: Do you find that the way that you have formed relationships with the writers and continue to have them is quite different from the way most publishing works these days?
JS: Probably. I work in an independent environment, not a corporate environment, so it’s a much different atmosphere. But also, the problem that New Directions had is a problem that I’ve had. After you’ve been in this business for a while, you have a stable of writers, living writers, who are producing work on a regular basis, and you run out of openings on your list. So it’s harder for me to take somebody new on, since my lists are so full of my old, my older writers. And that’s a limitation that is not easy to get used to. But it’s a fact of life, that I only have so much room in my work and in my life for the writers. But I’ve been loyal to them, and they’ve been incredibly loyal to me. And we’ve done, what is this now? Thirty years at Counterpoint and before that, fifteen years at Northpoint. Everything started for me in 1970 at Sand Dollar, so what is that, fifty years? Fifty years I’ve been dealing with some of these people. I’ve been dealing with Gary Snyder since then—I’ve known Gary Snyder since I was in high school! So these long relationships have been enormously formative for me, and satisfying, and I like to think—I guess it’s obvious I’ve done the job they hoped I would do or they wouldn’t still be with me.
FF: Thank you so much.